Updates - June 2021

Welcome to the Friendliest.app’s monthly updates!

First off, we want to thank everyone again who has provided feedback and suggestions. Many of the June updates were direct requests we have received. Thank you!

Main Page Layout

Originally, when we designed the app interface, it was based on the concept of users exploring - looking at the Lands in a Park, the Restaurants in a Land and then the Meals at a Restaurant. What we’ve learned from our community is that folks want to get to the answers quicker.

Over the last month, we’ve completely overhauled the main page of the app to allow for quicker navigation. For example, You can now select Peanuts directly from the Allergies section of the main page to get a list of all Peanut-friendly Meals across all Parks, Lands and Restaurants.

This is much faster than selecting Restaurants one at a time and filtering for the Peanut-friendly Meals. Don’t worry though, if you liked exploring the old way, that hasn’t changed at all.

Additionally, if you’ve created an account and set your allergies, you will now see a new section of the main page that lists the latest 5 meals that meet all of your allergy-friendly requirements.

Tagging Enhancements

Based on feedback and requests, we’ve extended our Restaurant tagging system to include Meals. You can now search for meals by tags like Snack or Burger or Iconic.

Content and Archives

As Restaurants reopened and Menus were expanded we added a lot of content throughout June. We now have 270 Allergy-friendly Meals indexed from 128 Restaurants across the Disneyland Resort. You can follow along with our live Data Tracker.

We also saw the first menu expansions and changes in June. One of the key features of the Friendliest.app is preserving the food history of Disneyland so all of these changes went into the archives. Think of it like the Disney Vault…but for food…kind of.

When a Menu is replaced or updated, we index the new menu and place the previous one in the Restaurant’s Menu archive. If a Restaurant has any archived Menus, a link will be shown directly below the current Menu.

Similarly, when a Meal is removed from a Menu, we archive it too, like the Cali-Grilled Angus Cheeseburger that was recently removed from the Hearthstone Lounge Menu.

When a Meal is archived, any Lists you have created that contain the Meal are automatically updated to show that the Meal is no longer available. Archives are currently accessible without an account, but will be a paid subscriber feature once we our out of Beta.

Infrastructure

Toward the end of June the Friendliest.app migrated our entire application and database infrastructure from Heroku to Render. This is part of our effort to provide the best user experience possible. If you’ve noticed content loading faster or the app behaving a bit snappier, this is why.

That’s all for this month. We hope you all have a safe, magical July!